At one-twenty-five in the afternoon, Imran Bell burst through the gallery window once more. He held his brass tone check rod high above his head like a signal bright light.
“Pella! Look at the chimney pipe!” Imran shouted, laughing with pure, unrestrained skilled joy. “The lantern beetles are turning around! They’re marching back down the brickwork! They’re pouring back into the deep bedrock cracks at two hundred bugs a minute!”
Pella ran to the casement window and looked out. Along the ancient Roman chimney stack, the emerald ribbon of insects was reversing its direction. It dropped smoothly into the cool, dark fissures between the foundation stones where they had nested for hundreds of years.
“What does it mean, Imran?” Kel Dorr asked, leaning over the doorstep.
“It means the bedrock has stopped shaking, Kel!” Imran explained, tapping the mica chest muscle of his sound stethoscope. “The shear hum has dropped from four hundred cycles to eight cycles! The rock is cold, stable, and settled! The river has stopped trying to tear the mountain apart! We’ve done it! The foundation has held!” Pella looked down at her measuring tongs, then across the gorge at the silent, tilted platform of the Hollow Crown. The underground uncoupling stage was finished. But the final strand was still in Davin Sorell’s dying hand.
